A variety of apparatuses for automatically inserting a wired terminal into a connector housing have conventionally been proposed and put into practical use (See Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication Nos. 3-283285, 3-274690, 60-47304, 63-45780, 63-164181, 63-170874, 1-313872, 5-6791, 5-82231.
Most of the conventional apparatuses have a terminal chuck for guiding a wired terminal and a wire chuck for holding the electric wire of the wired terminal at the vicinity of the terminal chuck and acts an inserting operation in such a way that the wired terminal, positioned by the terminal chuck, is faced to the corresponding cavity or the terminal housing chamber of a connector housing and is then inserted, along the terminal chuck, by the wire chuck.
In such a prior art, a wired terminal is received from a holding mechanism which holds the wired terminal, or a delivery mechanism for delivering a wired terminal.
Recently, a so-called terminal positioning device has been developed and has been equipped with the terminal inserting apparatus above-mentioned (See Japanese Patent Laid-Open Publication Nos. 3-283285, 3-274690. The applicant of the present invention has developed a terminal positioning device which can act, when the wired terminal is delivered to a terminal inserting apparatus, not only for providing a holding position of the wired terminal to the chucks, but also for correcting the posture of the wired terminal to be inserted into the terminal housing chamber of a connector housing. That is, inserting operation of some types of the wired terminal is conducted in such a way that the wired terminal is primarily twisted or rotated around an axis of the electric wire (hereinafter referred to as "inverted") and is then inserted into a terminal housing chamber of a connector housing by delivering the inverted wired terminal to the inserting apparatus upon maintaining the inverted posture.
There is a disadvantage in the conventional arrangement in that the inverted wired terminal often turns back its posture when it is delivered from the terminal positioning device to the terminal inserting apparatus, so that the predetermined inserting operation can not be conducted.
More specifically, in a terminal inserting apparatus of prior art, it is required to guide a wired terminal along the terminal chuck at the time of a terminal inserting operation. It is therefore required to form a gap between the terminal chuck and the terminal of the wired terminal. To cope with a variety of types of wired terminals, such a gap is formed as set to the largest terminal. As a result, when a wired terminal has a terminal small in size, such a wired terminal is merely loosely guided by the terminal chuck. This disadvantageously lowers the precision. Accordingly, when the inverted wired terminal is received from a terminal positioning device having a terminal inverting function, the terminal turns back due to the reaction force developed in the electric wire when the terminal is inverted at the time of delivery. This may often provoke an insertion mistake.
The inverting operation above-mentioned is not always executed on all wired terminals. It is therefore required that the terminal chuck guides both inverted and non-inverted wired terminals. However, the arrangement of prior art above-mentioned is not provided with a function of guiding wired terminals which respectively assume different postures.
An object of the present invention is to provide a terminal inserting apparatus capable of securely receiving a wired terminal from a terminal positioning device having an inverting function and also capable of inserting, in a proper posture, the wired terminal to a connector housing.